


I Call It Home

by Looks_Clear (chrysalisdreams)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s15e12 Galaxy Brain, Introspection, Season/Series 15 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:09:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24207226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chrysalisdreams/pseuds/Looks_Clear
Summary: Dark!Kaia struggles in a world foreign to her.
Kudos: 2





	I Call It Home

Kaia Nieves wakes from the dreams with tears hot against her cheeks. For the first moments, she doesn’t move. She listens, then opens her eyes just enough to take in her dim surroundings. Red light flashes through the many layers of camouflage covering her shelter. Shuffling sounds whisper from the other side of her dwelling: nothing to be alarmed about, just the movement of lizards in their cage.

In the first days after she healed, she didn’t sleep enough to dream -- or to dreamwalk. She didn’t feel safe. Her sleep was in light fits, when she nodded off from exhaustion. It was exhausting, being afraid all the time, being alone. Well, not alone. She was where red-eyed  _ things _ gibbered in the dark and nightmare creatures shook the ground when they passed, sounding like traveling earthquakes.

Now, tears still wet on her face, she tries to go back to sleep. Because when she dreams, she dreams of the Winchesters and angels and monsters, yes, but she also dreams of parking lots and backyard gardens, of ordinary people walking dogs, buying groceries, driving cars to ordinary places. Glimpses in shop windows. Forests with hiking trails and an empty cabin with furniture.

She dreams of home, the same way she dreamed of The Bad Place before she was left in it.

* * *

Crouched behind a dumpster, she waits. Many people are coming and going from their cars. They feel safer when there are many, safer in the noise and chaos. In her world, a crowd was a nest or a colony, never this passive herd of humans, loading food into their cars. Her world didn’t have cars, either.

She feels most confident after dark, though at night here people are more wary, and blazing lights wreck her vision. Neither are good for effective hunting. Instead, she has taken to hunting at dusk. At least the prey is easy. Since coming through the rift between worlds, she has not had to fight for her life in a long while.

The busy parking lot means that cars are parked in every spot, including the ones alongside and around the building, close to where the girl crouches. The dark colors she wears, the deep hood and long sleeves, hide her here as well as they did in the shade of her world’s towering trees and thick vegetation. She knows how to be still. To the people here, like this she is almost invisible until she moves.

When she moves, she moves faster than they react.

She chooses her target: one who reads to her as a caregiver. This one is a man, which is ideal, as the men are more startled by her appearance and less likely to realize threat from her until too late. His rolling cart has many bags in it, all full to capacity. He is leaning inside the car through the front door. The popping release of the trunk signals the ideal time for her to dart out and take her prey.

She has learned how food is grouped in the bags, and with a sharp assessment of contents, she pulls one out from all the others, grips it to her chest, and dashes through the aisle of moving cars on a sure path to her planned hiding place. Men like her target are more likely to give chase afterward, in their cars, she has learned, so the smart strategy is to lay low and wait before proceeding on to camp.

She picks through the doubled paper bag, examining her claim. She did well. Under a layer of aromatic leafy greens there is packaged meat of various kinds. One of the packages is preserved fish; she cuts the resistant plastic with her knife and immediately and fills her mouth with the smoky, pink meat. It is sweet without bitterness, but otherwise reminds her of home, of the lizards and snakes and fish, dried and smoked to last, that were staples of her diet. Then she wraps everything in a secure bundle.

She doesn’t know the words “lox,” “plastic wrap,” or “supermarket,” but the world is not completely unfamiliar. It’s the world of her dreams. She has been dreaming of this strange place all of her life, just as the one that is called Kaia dreamed of hers. She was always limited in her dreams, unable to fight well, suffering because she could not overcome her attackers. She was often beaten, and her dream self would cower from opponents that were merely human. They were terrible, powerless dreams. And now  _ she was in _ the dream world, able to fight. It felt good. One thing that did, at least.

But with the exception of the archangel and the monsters he had made, this world does not want her to fight. The rules here, if there are any rules, go against her instincts. Fighting is not the way to survive. Kaia’s way, she suspects, is the way to survive in this world, Kaia’s world: try not to be seen, watch, stay quiet. Hunting is more like scavenging. Staying alert and apart from others is the same, but in this world, the threats are confusing.

She leaves her hiding place, a garden shed in an overgrown backyard, and starts toward the fire-damaged building that is currently her home base. The bundle of food is now tied to her back with a cord, leaving her hands free to climb the high fence when she gets there. She rolls over the barbed wire, protected by her thick garments, and drops the long distance to the ground, landing silently. She climbs to the roof and through a charred gap.

In a few days she will move again. She would prefer to return to the place with trees, but as uncomfortable as it is to be near many people, human habitation conceals her movements better than her remote dwelling did. She prefers to evade Michael’s creatures than fight them, especially since trading her spear to Winchester.

There have not been any of those creatures after her in… she has lost track of the time, because she lacks the context for this world’s cycles, and she has been traveling too much to learn them for one place.

She prepares her meat to begin drying and cuts the bird into smaller pieces. She cooks the cuts that will not smoke well and eats until her belly feels ready to burst and the careful fire has become coals. The fragrance and smoke that escape her precautions are only noticeable inside the building, and only while she is present and the scents are fresh. The building still stinks enough with its own odor and that acrid odor will overpower the food smells that linger when her fire is out. Until then, she makes her sleeping place and enjoys the closest scent to home.

The smell of woodsmoke and meat helps turn her mind’s eye to another’s vision. Soon she is in a trance, dreamwalking. She sees the flickering of another fire. A storm is gusting against the arched walls. Lighting flashes and thunder crackles.

The girl is singing nonsense words.  _ “...elephants, elephants, jump over the fence, fence, fence…” _

* * *

“ _ They reached the sky, sky, sk--!”  _ Kaia whimpers when the thunder booms again. The thunder is almost continuous, rolling from loud to deafening after the repeating lighting flashes. She takes a breath and starts again. “ _ Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black, black…”  _ The song gives her mind something familiar to grab onto. It’s a rope, a tether to a life normal enough to have clapping rhymes. To a mother that used to say to her, on stormy nights, that the rain would make a beautiful world in the morning.

Morning in The Bad Place is just as bad as the night here.

In Kaia’s version, Miss Mary Mack does come back. All dressed in black, that other one -- Kaia believes that one wasn’t aiming at her. Otherwise, why would she bandage Kaia’s wound and put Kaia here in this shelter, with food and tools so that she could make fire and catch more food? She was going to come back. Kaia had to believe she was going to come back.

* * *

Her world is dying. She can feel it; she  _ knows. _ She sees it when Kaia ventures out. The gale blows as if it will wipe the world away. When Kaia looks up at the sky, it seems broken. That world is being broken.

Her home.

She came to this confusing world because it seemed peaceful. Because she was curious about a place where she would not always have to fight. She was envious of that, a world where even a weak creature like Kaia could survive.

Now she knows that Kaia is not weak, but that her strength is a different kind of strength, the kind needed to survive in  _ this _ world where dangers are so much less clear. She suffered, but Kaia belongs in this world.

She will get her spear back from Winchester, she decides, and make him follow through on his part of the trade. And when the boy who can open worlds makes it so she can return to hers, they can take Kaia back to this one.

With the same single-minded sense of purpose she has always lived by, she makes the decision to get home.

-o-


End file.
